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Geraldo Rivera uncovered ‘The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults’ on live television 40 years ago

Geraldo Rivera poses on the stairs heading down to the Lexington Hotel’s basement, where Al Capone supposedly kept a hidden vault. Forty years ago, millions of Americans tuned in to watch Rivera’s two-hour live television special revealing the contents of the “vault.” Steve Kagan / Getty Images
April 24, 2026

On April 21, 1986, television reporter Geraldo Rivera completed his final on-air shot in a live broadcast from the Chicago hotel where Prohibition-era Mob boss Al Capone supposedly had an underground vault. With 30 million viewers watching, the vault contained not much more than a couple of decades-old bottles and a cloud of dust. Afterward, sensing that critics would pounce, Rivera went on a bender, convinced his career was over. “He said he got tequila drunk across the street,” William Elliott Hazelgrove told The Mob Museum. Hazelgrove is the author of the newly released book, Capone’s Vault: The Real Story of the Biggest ...

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Frank Lucas, the drug kingpin who inspired ‘American Gangster, is dead

Frank Lucas, the brash New York drug kingpin whose life was depicted in the popular movie American Gangster, died Thursday,…

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Chinese Triads launder billions through Vancouver, buying luxury real estate, cars

The laundering scheme is so infamous that investigators call it the “Vancouver model.” The Triads, China’s organized crime syndicate, created…

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Top 5 women of organized crime

Men have dominated the history of organized crime as bosses, capos, soldiers and associates. They traditionally relegated women to servile…

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Was 1929 Atlantic City Mob meeting a strategy session to address the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre?

Ninety years ago this week, “America’s Playground” – Atlantic City, New Jersey – played host to a mysterious convening of…

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Several Mob movies in the making

“Everyone loves gangster movies.” This sentence, written by former FBI agent Joseph Pistone, leads off the forward to The Ultimate…

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Were Richard Nixon’s alleged ties to organized crime real or mere speculation?

In the final days before the 1968 presidential election, the so-called “war on crime” was the top domestic issue of…

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European Union: Organized crime deemed ‘highest’ security risk, greater than terrorism

Many of Europe’s top police officers were in the Netherlands last week attending a high-level conference focused on doing a…

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